RIOTUS

Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider is a perfect Anime show made for me. I remember the seinen manga series hit my radar late last year, and I’ve been waiting to read it in English ever since. Then the heavens of Anime opened up and said Here you go, have this wonderful blessing of a show. Now you might be like Why are you talking this up so much before you’ve even read it or seen it. It’s because of Kamen Rider. Kamen Rider is a tokusatsu television superhero show from Japan. It’s one of the big four properties from there in this genre of entertainment, along with Godzilla, Ultraman, and Super Sentai (the basis of Power Rangers). The first season/series is about a young man named Takeshi Hongo, who was kidnapped by an evil terrorist organization called Shocker. They kidnap, brainwash, and turn people into monstrous mutant cyborgs. Hongo awakens during the process before the brainwashing and fights his way out and dedicates the rest of his life to fighting Shocker and protecting the world from their evil.

A lot happens in the first season back in 1973, there’s another Kamen Rider, Shocker changes into Gel-Shocker, and more. Shocker within the canon is started by the remaining members of the Nazis. This show became very popular, leading to many other Riders afterward, along with a break from the late 80s through to 2000, where it was rebooted with the show Kamen Rider Kuuga. Kamen Rider and the idea of Henshin or transformation pose have been seen in so many things, even on our side of the Pacific. The Rider Kick, every Rider’s trademark attack, pops up in a multitude of things, like even the end of The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Kamen Rider’s bike even influenced James Gunn and Peacemaker’s bike in season two of Peacemaker. Recently, the first season of Kamen Rider was reimagined by Hideaki Anno in his “Shin” trilogy of films with Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman. Shin Kamen Rider updates part of the story for modern day, yet honors all the things he and others loved about that original show.

So this series, Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider, is a love letter not only to that show but to fans of that show and that era of the show that endures to this day. In the first episode, setting up the series, we meet  Tanzaburo Tojima, a 40-year-old man who’s been a fan of Kamen Rider his whole life. Specifically, the original series. Not V3, not Amazon, not Skyrider or even Stronger, but OG Hongo Kamen Rider. It consumed most of his life to try and work hard enough to be as much like Kamen Rider as he could. It’s cost him friends and brought bullying and violence into his life when he was in school, but none of that has shaken him from his goal. Nothing that is but age. What has this gotten him? He’s a grown man still focused on this old children’s show. He was about to give it all up, that is, until he sees on TV that people are attacking and robbing stores dressed as Shocker. Tojima can’t let this stand; if there is a Shocker, then there must be a Kamen Rider.

As a middle-aged man who enjoys not only geeky stuff but also heavy into the Kamen Rider franchise (I’ve watched around 40 percent of all Kamen Rider shows), seeing this kid grow up loving the show as they recreate the intro and parts of episodes in animation, along with him, I’m asking myself, “Should I still be into this”? Should I still buy toys and watch this show? Should I “grow up”? Also, with everything going on in the world, specifically the United States, seeing a person like “oh, you want to dress up and play Nazi (even an adjacent one)? I’mma punch you in the face!” is cathartic.

The show blends deep emotional scenes and character internal feelings and thoughts with his emotional outbursts, as well as some solid comedy. It is a bit more mature than Shonen anime, but in the first episode, not so much. The biggest leap is that this 40-year-old guy picked OG Kamen Rider over Kamen Rider Black/Black RX, which would’ve been the Rider for his age group. The animation is fluid, and there are some parts where the drawings get a little funky, but it also looks better than some of the manga with its consistency of look. The story got me locked in, though, for the whole season. It lived up to my hopes and is a great new addition to the fall anime lineup. Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider feels like a good entry point to Kamen Rider, just at a time when it’s beginning to go global.